Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Tlālōcān
Summary
Tlālōcān (t͡ɬaːˈloːkaːn̥; "place of Tlāloc") is described in several Aztec codices as a paradise, ruled over by the rain deity Tlāloc and his consort Chalchiuhtlicue. It absorbed those who died through drowning or lightning, or as a consequence of diseases associated with the rain deity. Tlālōcān has also been recognized in certain wall paintings of the much earlier Teotihuacan culture. Among modern Nahua-speaking peoples of the Gulf Coast, Tlālōcān survives as an all-encompassing concept embracing the subterranean world and its denizens.
In the Florentine Codex, a set of eighteenth-century volumes which form one of the prime sources of information about the beliefs and history of Postclassic central Mexico, Tlālōcān is depicted as a realm of unending Springtime, with an abundance of green foliage and edible plants of the region.
Tlālōcān is also the first level of the upper worlds, or the Aztecs' Thirteen Heavens, that has four compartments according to the mythic cosmographies of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of pre-Columbian central Mexico, noted particularly in Conquest-era accounts of Aztec mythology. To the Aztec there were thirteen levels of the Upper Worlds, and nine of the Underworld; in the conception of the Afterlife the manner of a person's death determined which of these layers would be their destination after dying. As the place of Tlālōc, 9th Lord of the Night, Tlālōcān was also reckoned as the 9th level of the Underworld, which in the interpretation by Eduard Seler was the uppermost underworld in the east.
As a destination in the Afterlife, the levels of heaven were reserved mostly for those who had died violent deaths, and Tlālōcān was reserved for those who had drowned or had otherwise been killed by manifestations of water, such as by flood, by diseases associated with water, or in storms by strikes of lightning. It was also the destination after death for others considered to be in Tlālōc's charge, most notably the physically deformed.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.